Abstract

Laonikos Chalkokondyles was a seminal Byzantine intellectual and historian. He belongs, together with George Sphrantzes (1401–77/8), Doukas (ca. 1400–70) and Michael Kritoboulos (ca. 1406–10), to the group of the four Byzantine historians who recorded the events of the Fall of Constantinople (1453). Laonikos is one of the few Byzantine historians who dealt extensively with the history of the Ottomans (Tōmadakēs 1993). Ηe composed a history in a way that he “seems to have taken oral … traditions and transformed them into Herodotean-Thucydidean narrative prose” (Kaldellis 2012a), relying at the same time upon various sources. He contributed to the cultivation of the study of Byzantine and Ottoman history and of ancient Greek historiography in the Renaissance, and was influenced by ideas about historical causation.

De Bakker, M. 2015. Explaining the end of an empire: The use of ancient Greek religious views in late byzantine historiography. In God in history: Reading and rewriting Herodotean theology from Plutarch to the renaissance, ed. A. Ellis, vol. 4, 127–171. Histos: Newcastle Upon Tyne.Google Scholar

Kaldellis, A. 2014b. A new Herodotos: Laonikos Chalkokondyles on the Ottoman empire, the fall of Byzantium, and the emergence of the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.Google Scholar